There’s something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person’s courage in the face of danger.

Sometimes even obscene. But, really, who is to say?

They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we’d never become real people. That’s how we’re made. If we just work each day and eat well—that would be strange and intolerable!

Conpletely ridiculous of course. Except for the part that's true.

The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products. This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.

We've had lies like that over here too. A whole bunch of them.

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.

With any luck then it's all God's will.

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl. He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn’t believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. She should at least have fingers.

Anyone here doubt it's a true story?

My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I’d once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka.

Of course with Putin now in power that's all in the past.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

Now that's clever.

For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.

Sure, in theory.

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.

Yeah, on the good days.

Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought.

But not you, right, Mr. Objectivist?

Youth’s scorn and its revolt against the established order, youth’s readiness for everything that is heroic, whether it is self-sacrifice or crime, its fiery seriousness and its unsteadiness—all this is nothing but its fluttering attempts to fly.

Worse: The fucking Kids.

What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.

Duck!

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.

But only making it worse as often as not.

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Nothing not postmodern about this, right?

He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.

A bit over the top, sure, but point taken.

He's an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden.

Me too. Only now it's more in the way of a jungle.

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

I'm still working on that, he thought.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

I’m saying that the right man for you might be out there right now and if you don’t grab him, someone else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband.

Is this really as ridiculous as it sounds?

I'll have what she's having.

Anyone recall what that actually was?

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

And then one day out of the blue the bottom just falls out.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

In other words they become actual Celebrities!

We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.

Trust me: You don't quite believe it less and less and less.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.

That was me once. One and then the other.

I don’t know you, she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.

And here of course any mirror will do.

Now and then, all of this struck me as being not so much ridiculous as faintly ominous. What if, by chance, these early-stage symptoms didn’t pass? If the hints at hysteria, delusion, weak nerves and so on, that I thought I could detect in what she said, ended up leading to something more?

What if, by chance, she's right? This time, in other words.

We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

Or they will make you realize something altogether different. And there are almost always a lot -- a hell of a lot -- more of them.

A soul doesn't have a body, so how can it be watching us?

It just can!!!

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.

Pitch black for some of us.

I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....

Let's not go there, he thought.

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

A hell of a lot harder for some.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Come on, it's almost never really that cut and dry.

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Okay, show me.

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

Now that's what I call a multiple orgasm.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

Obviously: more or less.

Darwin’s theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality.

You know where this takes me: contingency, chance and change.

It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection. It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.

In other words, whatever that means. Still, no doubt about it: point taken.

...the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

Not that anyone ever really does. At least not to the satisfaction of everyone else.

It is impossible to consider the mechanism of our intellect and the progress of our science without arriving at the conclusion that between intellect and matter there is, in fact, symmetry, concord and agreement. On one hand, matter resolves itself more and more, in the eyes of the scholar, into mathematical relations, and on the other hand, the essential faculties of our intellect function with an absolute precision only when they are applied to geometry.

And, now, moving on to ethics...

We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

Considerably. But only regarding the parts that matter most.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society.

My advice: Don't hold your breath.

The war educated a generation of believers in force. The demons of hatred and murder then released continue their activity.

Is that still going on?

Control and violence that is best reflected in the state, are evil in themselves. In this knowledge lies the great truth of anarchism.

Theoretically for example.

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

You know, if we let it.

Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism.

Not counting you, right, Mr. Objectivist?

It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.

Making him all that more dangerous perhaps.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.

Good luck with that, right?

I sometimes imagine I would like my ashes to be scattered in a library. But then the librarians would just have to come in early the next morning to sweep them up again, before the people got there.

What the fuck, do it anyway.

The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.

He may just as well have gotten that from me. Now ask me who I got it from.

To be a good writer... read a lot and write every day.

For starters I'm guessing.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Wow, is that depressing or what.

I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.

Of course it goes without saying that some aren't bothered by this at all.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

I can live with that he thought.

From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw

That makes [at least] two of us.

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

Let's reveal them anyway.

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

How much is that in American dollars?

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

But don't take it personally of course.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

I bet if Socrates were alive today he'd have a really annoying Twitter account.

Jesus too.

Philosophy is important because without it we would probably all think we knew what the fuck was going on.

So, how should we take this?

People think Logical Posivitism failed because it is self defeating, but that's a myth. It failed because the Vienna Circle were a bunch of nerds and no one wants the solution to philosophy to be some lame ass nerd shit like an "exact scientific language".

And that's all before the parts about dasein.

A good University professor usually has four traits: 1. Knowledgeable of the subject. 2. Passion for teaching. 3. Good at communicated. 4. Radicalizes the students towards global communism.

Is there even one of them left?

A lot of people think existentialism is just thinking about death all the time, but it is actually mostly about giving bad reviews to Camus's plays out of spite because you got into an argument about communism with him.

Jesus, not that again!

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

...you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.

Let's file this one [once again] under, "tired of living, scared of dying".

Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.

Clearly, something only the true artist can grasp.

I am writing this sitting in the waterlogged lobby of a rotting, half-finished condominium complex. I am surrounded by cavorting freshwater seals and have two pearl-handled revolvers in my lap, a bottle of vodka in my right hand, a human body in the freezer in the kitchens behind me, and a rather large displaced rockhopper penguin staring me in the face.

Sounds made up to me.

...subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous.

Numinous. What a great word for something that almost certainly doesn't exist.

Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.

Or, sure, just skip them all.

I think I would remember forgetting that.

Let's take this even deeper.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.

Let's pin down why that is.

In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.

Let's pin down why that is.

There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.

Never been myself but I don't doubt it.

His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.

I won't point to you if you don't point to me.

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.

Or, sure, it just seems that way.

It doesn’t do to read too much, Widmerpool said.You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Cue for example the best seller list.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Funnily enough, “self-criticism” is an idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice in men’s dealing with one another. The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.

Spot the irony?

Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

Impressions. Really, what to make of them?

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!

Among others [here], he means me.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Unless of course you discern God.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.

Let's apply this to, say, the Trump administration.

If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.

Let's apply this to, say, the Trump administration.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place.

The idle rich in particular.

She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.

We should all be that lucky.

Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

Tell that to the folks at, say, Sotheby.

But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn’t all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn’t have been the real thing.

Too many to count he thought.

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

Why on earth would you want them to?

After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.

Let's weep for their future.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.

Better that than ''no books inside you at all".

Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.

Right, like there really is nothing new under the sun.

When do I stop? When I'm tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give it up forever.

Let's name the folks here who should give it up forever.

You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

And then every once in a while the talented husbands of powerful women.

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I’ve brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It’s like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It’s a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that’s not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here’s a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That’s incredibly moving to me.

Of course nowadays most of what see on the news is fiction.

Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say.

You know, when that matters.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Religion in a nutshell?

Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religions, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.

Words deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.

Of course others can nudge it right back again.

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.

On the other hand, one way or another, everything comes down to that. Eventually.

Real data is messy....It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk.

Not only that but who's to say how real?

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Sure, if that actually works for you.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Okay but less trivial sometimes than others.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

So, how dumb is that?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles